A Brief Survey of Songs and Song Titles Relating Eye Color

Judging by the number of memorable tunes expressely relating the fact of somebody or other having one eye color or another, this physical trait is, assuredly, of some importance to songwriters. There are it turns out a great many songs referencing eye color in the song title -- which raises perhaps a bit of suspense, a bit of a risk, for instantly there is a point of identification for those who share the eye color of interest. A singer who warbles of how he loves his lady's blue eyes may break the hearts of all the brown-eyed girls who can't help but know that this song isn't about them.

This survey is by no means complete. It can't even scratch the surface of complete. So many songs would fall into this category that it is instead a smattering of some of the more interesting such examples. (If I'm missing something which really deserves to be mentioned, draw my attention and I'll hook it up.)

The Elton John song simply titled "Blue Eyes" is probably the best known of the dozen or more songs bearing that same simple two-word title. I'll save you the suspense by telling you now, songs simply titled "Green Eyes" or "Brown Eyes" are equally prodigious. We'll mention some anyhow.

For a song with content more reflective of the title, songwriter Fred Rose wrote one in this genre for Roy Acuff, but it was Willie Nelson who made Rose's "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain" a hit. Restless Heart twangily told us about "The Bluest Eyes in Texas."The Velvet Underground sing to us of "Pale Blue Eyes," reflecting on lost love by asking us to "linger on, your pale blues." Jan Terry sings of "Baby Blues" which are "crystal clear, blue enough to fill a swimming pool." A band called Voltaire offers a Spanish-march themed "Blue-eyed Matador" -- wherein the bull is described as a "red-eyed beast" and the song parades out that "Suddenly I remember /The girl with eyes like the sea /I turn, she winks and she﻿ smiles gently /While the bull runs straight into me."

But (in mine own humble opinion) the standard for referencing eyes of this hue falls to "Green Eyed Lady" by Sugarloaf, which has one of the funkiest bass tracks put to wax, and uses it to convey the idea of the fiery green-eyed femme fatale, that "Green-eyed lady, lovely lady. Strolling slowly towards the sun. Green-eyed lady, ocean lady. Soothing every wave that comes." Surely her glance will foreshadow your emotional destruction, possessed as she is of a heart too funkalicious to be captured by mortal man.

Well, then we come, inevitably, to brown eyes. And all of the above songs set aside, there is one which surely stands atop the pile of all eye-color themed songs, and this is "Brown Eyed Girl" by Van Morrison, a paeon to growing up in young love and "making love in the green grass behind the stadium" (a sentiment which was originally censored out). And, surprisingly enough, this almost never was a song referencing eye color, as Van Morrison had originally intended the Caribbean-inspired rhythm to reference a brown-skinned girl-- but somewhere along the writing process, a point he himself later could not recall, the girl became brown-eyed and her skin color was left up to the imagination.

Smoove jazzily celebrates "The Brownest Eyes," and in the lyrics expands on those being the biggest brownest eyes. The Pogues rattle on in their deep Irish brogue about "A Pair of Brown Eyes," though the song is mostly about the cursed ground of Irish oppression, movingly declaring:

Some cursed, some prayed, some prayed then cursedAnd prayed then bled some moreAnd the only thing that I could seeWas a pair of brown eyes that was looking at me.But when we got back, labeled parts one to threeThere was no pair of brown eyes waiting for me.And a rovin' a rovin' a rovin' I'll goFor a pair of brown eyes.For a pair of brown eyes.

Brown-eyed girl Kelly Clarkson had her second breakout hit with "Behind These Hazel Eyes,"hazel being generally deemed a shade of brown and so fitting in here. Somewhat similarly to "Behind Blue Eyes," this song addresses the chanteuse's own thoughts, framing them as what is going on behind those eyes (from which you won't see tears, 'cause, she informs us, "I don't cry on the outside anymore.") And speaking of eyes which are brown, but not exactly brown, Southern star Crystal Gayle crossed color lines (eye color lines, anyway) altogether in country-crooning "Don't It Make My Brown Eyes Blue"; Gayle's eyes were, in fact, blue all along.

Songs simply referencing brownness of eyes seem less frequent than those for blue, but one comes away thinking that the INXS song "Mystify" is obliquely relating such a reference when speaking of "Almond looks /That chill divine." The Taylor Swift song "Superman" tells us "Something in his deep brown eyes has me saying /He's not all bad like his reputation," while Bachman-Turner Overdrive regales us with a study in contrast, "she looked at me with big brown eyes, and said: You ain't seen nothing yet."

There are a few songs out there referencing other eye colors besides the big three. Big Country sing of the "Girl With Grey Eyes," mournfully observing that they "only see the sad grey eyes." Second tier rocker Shawn Phillips has a song called "Steel Eyes" (about "steel grey" eye color, not robot peepers). A fellow noder notes that the Doobie Brothers as well sing of "Eyes of Silver": "Eyes of silver hungry and aware/Eyes of silver, your mystic love I share."

And another noder pointed out to me that "the excellent "Kajra Re," from Bunty aur Babli, is about kohl-lined/black black eyes." Snowden's song "Black Eyes", highlighted by another noder, appears to be directed to eye color as well, and not the results of violence, as the song ultimately relates how "in your black eyes, you were hiding.... you were hiding nothing, nothing at all." And oh my stars, Electric Six goes to the opposite end of the spectrum with 80s techno warning us of the "White Eyes" -- "everybody here gonna have white eyes, when they die!!" And, no joke, the song climaxes with:

As I take my last steps toward that guiding light;I can hear that ghost laughing as my eyeballs turn white;I got white eyes;I say everybody here gonna have white eyes.

So whoever you love or otherwise aim to impress with a serenade to their eye color, be comforted in the notion that whatever that color is, there are songs which relate it in their titles at least, if not in lyrics as well.